More blog, less excrutiating minutiae.
The popularity in the US of Rumi, a 13th-century Turkish poet, is a tragic irony, as the order of Sufi dervishes he founded is banned at home, writes William Dalrymple (Guardian)
[photograph: http://www.korfez.net/mevlana]
The essence of what Dalrymple writes is perhaps best surmised in this photograph of rumi’s mystism turned into a circus act:
Talk turned today to my impressions of that ghastly film ‘bride and prejudice’ (on which I wrote a particularly vitriolic write up as I foamed at the mouth having wasted a hard earned 5 quid on the film) this was just one of coincidences that happens, unconnected I am sure to the fact that The Friday Times published a rather late film review, which to my considerable disgust manages to explain away the films monstrous failings under the guise of something about ‘Bollywood being Bollywood’.
I am also currently reading Salman Rushdie’s ‘midnight’s children’ which after many misses with the likes of Kamila Shamise is one of the few books by a desi author I find inspiring. I need not add that the book, or atleast what I’ve read of it is a tour de force of inspired, and deeply imaginative writing.
My excitement for a newly discovered desi writer I admire is tempered by today’s reading of the stinging review of Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie’s latest book) in the New York Times book review; it seems Rushdie may have lost the touch, ‘lazily’ crafting single faceted characters cast in premature plots. Shame, for as far as Midnight’s children goes, the writing is nothing if not captivatingly brilliant.
These many diverse threads seems to flow into a seemingly irrelevant article by William Dalrymple, titled unenlightening ‘the lost sub-continent (Observer, August 13, 2005)’ as I read through it, funny how I realize it to be a confluence of ideas I so sure I’ve almost toyed with sub-consciously over the last couple of days.
Take Kamila Shamsie, a rather pedestrial author if you ask me (who, for the purposes of this post stands in for all the myriad similar clones celebrated as ‘writers’) and yet, she and others of her elk are celebrated as writes – even while they piggybacking either the ‘chutnification’ phenomenon (to borrow Rushdie’s expression) or indeed our hunger to immerse ourselves in stories from home. My invective is put more elegantly in the article itself:
writer and critic Pankaj Mishra has attacked what he called the “slickly exilic version of India”, manufactured by a “cosmopolitan Third World elite … suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth, and often weighed down with a kind of intellectual simplicity foreign readers are rarely equipped to notice”.
So why bride and prejudice then?
The movie is more than just a badly written, anemically plotted absurdity, it is a manifestation of this very sort of scrubbed, romantic flights of fancy that come about from skewed perceptions of what living in the sub-continent is really about. Cloying visions of India/Pakistan are all very well, but when we start believing them to be true or even worse, dumb down artistic expression to worthless baubelized trinkets, Mishra’s indictment for intellectual simplicity seems to hit home. There is no other explanation for why preposterously bad literature, such as that penned by Shamsie should succeed.
Turning to a thread touched upon in the article, I cant help but wonder how we so can readily accept English writing by homegrown authors (who, as we find flee the coop as soon as possible) as our ‘own’ ironically, since most of this is written with an eye to the west at any rate. I think its one of those everyday exceptional things that you kind of never realize is rather unusual. It would be hard to imagine, for example this kind of sentiment in any other part of the world for literature that is written in a language and cultural context so at odds to its own.
But then this post-colonial stake that the sub-continent retains in the English language means English is considered as much a local language as Urdu or Hindi. For the educated middle class that generally begets these authors, perhaps even more so. When these authors work dal recipies into books with a mind to boost sales in sub-urban waterstones, the castigation as a sell out, de-ethnicised desi now seems understandable in context. And herein i think lies the explanation of why they are treated so different from Hemmingway. Where they share a language, the two milieus are also diametrically apposed; it’s in many ways a mutually exclusive constraint that writers from other English speaking countries such as Australia don’t have to face.
On the whole the article Dalrymple is arresting if meandering; he brings a perspective few other ‘firgangi’ authors can match, immersed as he is in the ways of the sub-continent; his mention in passing to Dehli ki Akhri Shama, just the sort random aside he can draw upon to make his writing so much more interesting.
The footnote mentions ‘white mughals’ Dalrymple’s latest book is to be brought to the stage. Many were unable to push through the book (admittedly it made for some rather heavy going every now and then) hopefully theatre will make the fascinating story he narrates more widely heard. In the current din of clash of civilizations, it would be illuminating to hear an account of people who agreed that at the end of the day, we are more similar that dissimilar.
“Aey sarzameen-e-Pak zarrey terey hein aaj sitaron sey tabnak. Roshan hey kehkashan sey kahin aaj teri khak.”
O land of Pakistan, each particle of yours is being illuminated by stars. Even your dust has been brightened like a rainbow.”
It seems the current national anthem (penned by Hafeez Jullundhri) wasnt the original one. Funny this is the first time i am hearing about it - considering how we were made to study (compulsory) ‘Pakistan studies’ in school, where wranglings over the national anthem was a subject given some importance. An intriguing editorial and article in the Daily Times explains more..
Given the recent controversy in India regarding Mr Jinnah’s secular credentials, amid a similar debate in Pakistan as the centre-right and liberal camps lock horns, the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, may have done all of us much good by reporting on what eminent Indian poet Jagan Nath Azad had to say a year prior to his death. According to the late Mr Azad, who was based in Lahore in 1947, he was asked by Mr Jinnah to write the national anthem for the new state of Pakistan. This is how Mr Azad described it: “On the morning of August 9, 1947, there was a message from Pakistan’s first governor-general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was through a friend working in Radio Lahore who called me to his office. He told me ‘Quaid-e-Azam wants you to write a national anthem for Pakistan.’ I told them it would be difficult to pen it in five days and my friend pleaded that as the request had come from the tallest leader of Pakistan, I should consider his request. On much persistence, I agreed.”
Gone was Hameed, the carefree friend who was always clowning, the googly bowler, Shakespeare’s Shylock, unknown resident of Bombay’s crowded city. He was dead and buried somewhere in that city in a nameless grave, and we who loved him had come to know of it months later, through a postcard.
http://www.thefridaytimes.com/page19.shtml
I always enjoy Khaled Hasans’ columns in the Friday Times.
He’s lived a life that only someone immersed in the meandering, chaotic political milieu of Pakistan can. From reading one of his translations (A wet afternoon, Saadat Hassan Manto) and sporadic readings of the column, I gather he was with the Pakistan Times (A left-leaning newspaper in the 60’s that was famously edited by Faiz Ahmed Faiz) and a press secretary of Bhutto during that short lived idealistic dawn of a Pakistani political identity.
I digress, getting back to this weeks column. ‘The last warrior’ is an epitaph to Ahmed Bashir, another from that fast disappearing breed of men, those with true personalities and the soul to bravely fight the haemorrhaging corruption and decrepitude of a dream that turned all too quickly into a nightmare.
Khalids’ translation of an Ahmed Bashir article reads:
I have seen Ayub looting the country. And then Zia-ul-Haq; and Benazir; and Nawaz Sharif. As for myself, I have never auctioned my politics, or my conscience or my integrity. Today I am a tired old man of eighty who is sick, stricken by a plethora of painful diseases. I now lie here waiting for the awesome blast of that trumpet that will make birds fly out of trees. I have no property, no money, no regrets but my soul is at peace because I know I have never done anything bad knowingly
And as Kaifi Azmi (who as card-carrying member of the congress party was put in a not entirely different situation soon after independence) wrote for Kaghaz ke Phool (Guru Dutt)
Waqt ne kiya kiya haseen sitam
Jaayenge kaha sujhta nahi
chal pade magar raasta nahi
Kya talaash hai kuchh pata nahi
Bun rahe hain dil khaab dam-ba-dam
..
Read “Ahmed Bahir, The last warrior” [TFT - Sub required]
He whirls slowly but unsteadily at first-like a pirouetting dervish intoxicated with the very rhythm that moves him-in concert with the rising and falling intonations. At once harmonious and cacophonous, the overpowering music builds, as the man moves faster, while the credence seemingly accommodates, impossibly in sync.
The heady mixture of music and sanctity is mesmerising. And as the rhythms reach their crescendo, the rapidly twirling blur now collapses to a heap on the floor, fulfilled in a haze of man, music and mysticism.
From Bhajans to gospel choirs, that music moves the spirit is a notion steeped in the very foundations of the human consciousness.
Though fictionalised, these are events that have unfolded where a soulful, gritty and undiluted ancient mystical musical art is practised-anywhere where Qawwali is still sung from the heart.
With its distinctive chorus, Qawwali is instantly recognizable. But its much less commonly explored. If not an enigma, then the qawwali is still a flavour on the fringes of the mainstream interest.
Here in Pakistan, the last bastion of the authentic Qawwali, we still have much to appreciate and celebrate in an art simultaneously at its evolutionary zenith and its twilight. (more…)
Saturday February 12, 2005
The Guardian
Interview by Richard Johnson
Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.
Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can’t drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability.Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn’t “calculating”: there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”
Eqbal Ahmad: Post - Pokhran Days
Pervez Hoodbhoy
The more things change, they more they stay the same. Its funny how universal some axioms can be. The mountain turning white in chagai is a almost a distant memory, but for those harangues repeated ad-nauseum of how we stand ready to guard our kahutas and our kamras.
But somehow it seems our issues never really change, what Imran wrote of, what Hoodboy writes below are problems that still plague us. To me this is a far from stale essay, but rather, with the benefit of hindsight, a inspiringly erudite discussion..
Now was the time of the Kalams and Khans, the Chidambarams and Mubarikmands.
He fought for Kashmiri self-determination in 1948, against French imperialism in Algeria in the early 60’s, roused students on American campuses in the early 70’s against their government’s immoral war in Vietnam, dodged arrest by the CIA in a case trumped up by Richard Nixon’s government that accused him of trying to kidnap Henry Kissinger, passionately campaigned against the ethnic cleansing of East Pakistan by the West Pakistani army, and was the trusted
lieutenant of the Palestinian leadership. With the passage of years, and his eventual return to Pakistan, his efforts gradually focussed upon healing the wounds of Partition, and diffusing the poison of intolerance and militarism of the post-Zia era. Challenge and adversity left him undaunted - until that fateful day of 11 May 1998, when the ground trembled uncontrollably at Pokharan and the subcontinent was to change forever. Exactly one year later - on 11 May 1999 - Eqbal Ahmad died in an Islamabad hospital. He was 67.
In Pakistan We Have Selective Islam
By Imran Khan
My Generation grew up at a time when colonial hang up was at its peak. Our older generation had been slaves and had a huge inferiority complex of the British. The school I went to was a similar to all elite schools in Pakistan, despite becoming independent, they were, and still are, producing replicas of public school boys rather than Pakistanis. I read Shakespeare which was fine, but no Allama Iqbal. The Islamic class was not considered to be serious, and when I left the school I was considered amongst the elite of the country because I could speak English and wore western clothes. Despite periodically shouting Pakistan Zindabad at school functions, I considered my own culture backward and Islam an outdated religion. Amongst our group if anyone talked about religion, prayed or kept a beard he was immediately branded a Mullah. Because of the power of the Western Media, all our heroes were western movie or pop stars. When I went to Oxford already burdened with this hang up from my school days, things didn’t get any easier. In University not just Islam but all religions were considered anachronism. Science had replaced religion and if something couldn’t be logically proved it did not exist. All supernatural stuff was confined to the movies. Philosophers like Darwin who with his half baked theory of evolution was supposed to have disproved the creation of man and hence religion. Moreover, the European history had an awful experience with religion. The horrors committed by the Christian clergy in the name of God during the Inquisition had left a powerful impact on the western mind. To understand why the West is so keen on secularism, one should go to places like Cordoba in Spain and see torture apparatus used during Spanish Inquisition. Also the persecution of scientists as heretics by the clergy and convinced the Europeans that all religions are regressive.
Jan. 17 issue - Jack Grubman, the king of Wall Street’s telecom analysts, didn’t always hate AT&T. He had worked for the company once, as did his wife. And as an analyst, he often had been positive on the stock through the 1980s and into the mid 1990s. But Grubman’s research turned considerably more negative on AT&T after federal legislation in 1996 gave a big boost to new rivals like WorldCom and Global Crossing. They emerged as Grubman’s favorite stocks, and his relentless championing of those companies put his firm, Salomon Smith Barney, and its parent, Citigroup, first in line to underwrite billions in stocks and bonds to raise money that the telecoms needed to build their massive networks. Grubman knew how to work the systemýearning an average of $20 million a year. Grubman grew even more bearish on AT&T when C. Michael Armstrong was named CEO in 1997. Outgoing and smooth, Armstrong had been a top salesman for IBM, and later CEO of Hughes Electronics. He vowed to shake things up at AT&T, by slashing expenses and making acquisitions. Grubman didn’t buy the strategy, though, and he soon put a “hold” on the stockýa no-confidence vote for Armstrong. Inside the telecom industry, people knew Grubman’s opinion wasn’t just about business. Grubman despised Armstrong. At conferences and in chats with his top clients, Grubman bashed the AT&T CEO as an “empty suit,” a “delusionist,” or a “f—— fraud.”
The English Sufi
Kazy Javed
The best-known European Muslim scholar and Sufi saint, Martin Lings, blessed the city of Lahore with a brief visit in the middle of the current month. He was the guest of the Iqbal Academy which arranged his public lecture at Aiwan-e-Iqbal just eleven days ahead of his 96th birthday anniversary. He is only a little hard at hearing, all the rest of his mental and physical faculties seemed to be well tuned. He stood straight for more than an hour of lecturing with his classical English accent. About 250 men and women, young and old, had assembled there to hear the man who has spent the major part of his life writing and disseminating Islamic teachings to modern readers. There were no chairs for many but they stood up to applaud the scholar who with his jubba and amama and gleaming forehead and eyes gave the look of some grand saint of the Middle Ages.
Martin Lings was introduced in our corner of the world by Maulana Jaffar Qasmi. Qasmi had gone to England as a young man to become a barrister. Instead, he returned as a Sufi of Shazlia order which was hardly known here. He was appointed the first Muqaddam, that is some sort of a country chief, of Shazlia order in Pakistan.
Dr Martin Lings belongs to the same order. He embraced Islam in 1928 under the influence of Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawi, the Algerian Sufi saint and scholar who is credited with regenerating Shazlia order of Muslim Sufism. He died in the early 1930s. Dr Lings has written a full-scale book on him under the title of A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century which met with great acclaim in mystical circles.
‘Mohyeddin reminisces that as director of the PIA Arts Academy in the early Seventies, he was asked to set up a national theatre. “I told the government that it is not like setting up the National Ghee Corporation. You can only have a national theatre when you have theatre. The National Theatre in England came about just 50 years ago, after theatrical activity had existed there for nearly 700 years, if not more.” ‘
18th August 1954 –“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of short story writing. Under tons of earth he lies, wondering who of the two is the greater short story writer: God or he.”
As bored as we all are with the American elections- this was a little story that i just could’nt let pass by..
As is the Guardians way- it came out in force to support the Kerry campaign. It might have gone too far when it printed this article by Charlie Brooker, which ended with the paragraph:
“On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?”
Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer
By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, November 14, 2004; Page F07
Internet Explorer, you’re fired. (more…)
